The CEU Prehistoric Museum exhibits the best of eastern Utah’s cultural and fossil heritage. Native Americans carved existence out of the blue clay foothills of the mountains and the frozen sand dunes of the desert. Exhibits at the Prehistoric Museum honor ancient lives, how animals and people survived in an environment that at times was both very similar and very different to today’s world.
The museum has two large exhibition halls: the Hall of Dinosaurs and the Hall of Archaeology. Utah’s state fossil, Al the Allosaurus, greets visitors to the Hall of Dinosaurs where many other dinosaurs, including famous Utahraptor, await discovery. Some of the dinosaurs are recent scientific finds less than 10 years old, not to be found on exhibit at any other museum in the world.
See first-hand the tracks of dinosaurs that wandered the marshes that became our modern-day coal mines.
The Hall of Archaeology recently opened a new exhibit on Paleo-Indians, our state’s first immigrants from more than 12,000 years ago. A striking 40-foot mural by renown western and wildlife artist Joe Venus provides the setting for a diorama featuring the wildlife of the time: mammoths, mastodons, camels, bison, short-face bears, sloths, musk oxen, saber-tooth cats, and dire wolves. It includes life-size replicas of the Huntington Mammoth and short-face bear, a dire wolf and saber-tooth cat. In addition visitors will see the skull of an extinct bison and a mastodon. The exhibit highlights the efforts of human beings to survive in an environment that would by hostile by today’s standards. It also represents the end of the large Ice Age fauna in Utah.
Another diorama and exhibit features the Fremont Indians, a unique farming culture that lived in Utah a thousand years ago.
Children will enjoy hands-on activities in the Discovery Room. They can “dig” dinosaur bones, touch a replica of a dinosaur brain, and feel the bumps on the body armor of an armored dinosaur.
The Castle Country Regional Information Center employees will greet you in the lobby, prepared to answer all of your traveling questions.For information, contact the CEU Prehistoric Museum toll-free at 1-800-817-9949 or call the facility 435-637-5060.
Exhibits of a Lifetime
